Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> More has happened in the last half century than in all of humanity before that in terms of scientific progress.

The vast majority of scientific advances in the last hundred years happened before World War I and right after - most notably, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Computing was discovered right after WWII, as was the transistor. Lisp and FORTRAN are older than 50 years. We landed on the moon more than 50 years ago.

Nothing discovered since the 70s compares to the advances in science and technology made in the first half of the twentieth century.

Edit: tone. Also, remembered that flight was also discovered in the first part of the twentieth century, as was radio transmission. Basically the world went from steam and letters and thinking about mechanics roughly in terms discovered in the 1600s to planes, mass media, computers and understanding the structure of matter and space time from 1900 to 1960. Anything that happened since then is only minor iterative improvements.

> Nothing discovered since the 70s compares to the advances in science and technology made in the first half of the twentieth century.

Not buying that in the slightest.

Reusable rocket boosters? Battery tech? International money movement? Everything in tech from 2000 to present?

Sure, if you just define "everything since the 70's doesn't spark my imagination" then you win this round of nihilism, but the last 50 years have been amazing.

None of these technologies fundamentally improve anyone's life, and they are all incremental.

Reusable rocket boosters are nice, but they're not making anyone's life better (they barely even reduce the costs of space flight).

Battery tech is important, but again, it is a minor addition; the improvements so far don't even help with a renewable grid, as they are reliant on a very scarce resource - Lithium.

International money transfer has existed since the 1600s, technology has really only sped things up; if anything, the main advances were legal, not techical; not to mention, there are good arguments to be made that the ease of directly owning factories and dev centers in other countries has been an overall negative for local businesses, replacing global trade and competition with behemoths doing global financing.

And yes, everything in tech from the 2000s onwards is nice, but incremental and not any sort of leap for mankind, outisde of some medical technologies.

And much of this is obvious. In the first half of the twentieth century, we went from steam locomotives to rockets capable of reaching the moon. In the second half, we were able to make some parts of those rockets reusbale. How can you claim with a straight face that the latter is a bigger advancement than the former?

Since creating rockets capable of reaching the moon we've sent rovers to Mars and launched space telescopes capable of analyzing other galaxies billions of LY away. How can you claim with a straight face that the latter is a smaller advancement than the former?

What economic value comes from that stuff? reusable rocket boosters are a rounding error on the American economy.

I absolutely reject the premise that the we should only consider inventions that single-handedly revolutionize the world. A lot of these so-called incremental rounding errors add up to significant sums.

No one is saying that the last 50 years have not been good for progress, or that these discoveries do not have value.

But to claim that they amount to more progress than all of the rest of human history combined is objectively wrong, especially given the amazing advances of the 50-70 years preceding them (1900-1969), which did fundamentally revolutionize human knowledge and form the scientific advances that all subsequent progress is based on, from planes to rockets and from QM to fusion reactors today.

Sorry i was specifically referring to the reusable boosters and astronomy.

Landing on Mars is fundamentally similar to landing on the Moon - slightly easier in some ways (no humans, some atmosphere), slightly harder in others (much farther away, so need more energy; much slower comms, so impossible to manually correct anything). Launching a space telescope is easier than either, as you don't have to land.

The robotics wasn't there to create the rover, so the mission wouldn't have made sense, but the technology that allowed NASA to land on the moon wpuld have allowed them to land something on Mars as well.

Honestly, a better counter would have been the gravitational wave detector, the kind of precision we have achieved in measurement is awe-inspiring. On the other hand, the Michelson-Morley experiment was also quite impressive for its time, though a good few orders of magnitude less precise.

You hand-waved away the advancements in robotics like it was nothing. You ignored the significant technological advancements behind the space telescopes, focusing instead on the relatively mundane transportation method. What's up with that?

I was comparing apples to apples - spaceflight to spaceflight, like the GP did (first rocket VS reusable rocket boosters).

For the space telescope, the first ones became operational in 1962, and the fundamental principles are the same. The advancements are wonderful, but they are iteration, not some paradigm shift.

Robotics is probably the most impressive of the three, though again, some of the basics of these systems and algorithms date back to the first AI explosion of the 1950s and 60s.

To emphasize again: the point isn't to piss on the extraordinary work of the scientists and engineers working in the last 50 years on these technologies. It is to recognize that the work of the pioneers of these fields from the 40s to the 60s is even more awe inspiring.

Reusable rocket boosters are cool but if you compare their impact with for example manned flight and the invention of airplanes, I think you will find that the latter have been more important for human progress.

> The vast majority of scientific advances in the last hundred years happened before World War I and right after - most notably, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics.

Specifics: Higgs boson. Discovery of neutrino mass. Quantum chromodynamics. Imaging the event horizon around a black hole. Gravitational wave detection.

More generally: General relativity came out in 1915. That didn't mean that we knew everything about gravity in 1915, though. We only were able to do certain more detailed calculations recently. Do you ascribe all of that progress to 1915?

And, if something similar is discovered today, the later pieces - the more detailed calculations - haven't shown up yet. That makes it hard for anything today to have the impact of things 100 years ago, since much of the impact hasn't happened yet, even if the one-time-event discovery has.

Relativity and quantum mechanics have been paradigm shifts in our understanding of the world. They were immediately recognized as such.

A discovery of equal impact today would be the unification of those two. The Higgs boson doesn't even come close to the importance of the Schrodinger equation, and neither does QCD even.

Similarly, imaging a black hole is nowhere near close to the discovery of general relativity, which fundamentally and almost immediately changed how we interpret celestial mechanics.

Let me put it another way. Take a person who was well versed in the state of the art of technology and science in 1950 and bring them to the current time: all their wildest dreams about what we could do will have been fulfilled.

But bring a similar person from 1890 to 1950, and they will not be able to recognize a single thing about the state of science and technology. They will not have been able to imagine anything that they would be seeing. That is how fundamentally the world changed in that period.

> Let me put it another way. Take a person who was well versed in the state of the art of technology and science in 1950 and bring them to the current time: all their wildest dreams about what we could do will have been fulfilled.

> But bring a similar person from 1890 to 1950, and they will not be able to recognize a single thing about the state of science and technology. They will not have been able to imagine anything that they would be seeing. That is how fundamentally the world changed in that period.

The first working transistor was in 1947. Your person "well versed in the state of the art of technology and science" in 1950 might know about them. Having 10 billion of them on one substrate working together is still revolutionary, though - something the person in 1950 probably wouldn't expect and certainly couldn't envision the effects of.

Edison produced his first electric light bulb in 1879. Your person from 1890 would know about them, and would recognize lighting in 1950. They wouldn't recognize LEDs, though, or even florescent tubes.

Bell's telephone worked in 1876. Your person in 1890 would know it, and would recognize communications in 1950. Neither they nor the person from 1950 would recognize cell phones in peoples' pockets.

Your person from 1950 would know about computers as stand-alone behemoths in data centers. The internet is not something they would understand; computers didn't talk to each other in 1950.

And so on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com